Oliver Otis Howard

Oliver Otis Howard (8 November 1830-26 October 1909) was a US Army Major-General who served in the American Civil War and the Plains Indian Wars. He notably led the Freedmen's Bureau after the Civil War's end, and he founded Howard University and served as its first president from 1867 to 1873.

Biography
Oliver Otis Howard was born in Leeds, Maine in 1830, and he graduated fourth in his class from West Point in 1854. He served in the US Army in Florida during the Third Seminole War, and he converted to evangelical Christianity and was nicknamed "the Christian General" for his deep religious piety. During the American Civil War, he became a brigade commander in the Army of the Potomac, losing his right arm at the Battle of Fair Oaks in 1862. He went on to become a corps commander, and he suffered humiliating defeats at the Battle of Chancellorsville and the Battle of Gettysburg in May and July 1863, although he later became a successful corps commander in the Western Theater during the Chattanooga Campaign, the Atlanta Campaign, the March to the Sea, and the Carolinas Campaign. In mid-1865, he was given charge of the Freedmen's Bureau with the goal of integrating former African-Americans into the American South's society and politics. He required freed people to work on former plantation land under pay scales fixed by the Bureau on terms negotiated by white landowners, and his attempts to protect freed blacks from hostile conditions was repeatedly frustrated by President Andrew Johnson. The Radical Republicans won control of the US Congress in 1866 and enfranchised African-Americans, and Howard oversaw the freedmen's junction with Republican coalitions and their electoral victories in many southern states. He went on to promote higher education for freedmen, and he founded Howard University in Washington DC and served as its president from 1867 to 1873. After 1874, he commanded troops in the American West during the Plains Indian Wars, subjugating the Apache in 1872, the Nez Perce in 1877, and the Paiute in 1878. He retired in 1894 and died in Burlington, Vermont in 1909 at the age of 78.